When you hear the word, "intimacy", your mind almost undoubtedly jumps to the thought of two lovers sharing a romantic moment. Most often, two lovers share an intimate moment when they are in a private setting. Intimacy and privacy are inseparably linked. Intimacy does not only mean closeness in a romantic sense, but rather it encompasses any closeness or familiarity two or more people can have among each other.
Privacy and intimacy go hand-in-hand. As I previously stated, intimacy is any closeness shared by two or more people. If the privacy disappears from the situation, then the intimacy also disappears, because the closeness shared by people cannot be experienced when others who do not share the same closeness are present. For example, in The Circle, after Mae's first day on the job, there was a large campus-wide party. After losing Annie, Mae finds a man named Francis. Franics and Mae talk about her first day, and they share a few minutes of intimacy, escalated when Franics compliments Mae's voice. However, this experience is sharply curtailed when Annie suddenly drops in on the two. This is a perfect example of how lack of privacy is synonymous with lack of intimacy.
Another example of the relationship between privacy and intimacy comes later in the novel when Mae had a meeting with Dan and Alistair. Mae had missed a brunch and the person in charge of it was very distraught. The problem was resolved and the meeting was adjourned very quickly. At the end of the meeting, the three Circlers hugged. When Mae went to tell Annie about it, she discovered that Annie already knew. Mae was not very comortable with that. "In quick succession, two waves passed over Mae. First, profound unease that Annie had been listening without her knowledge..." (Eggers 31). Mae had shared an intimate moment with the two other people in the room, and when she found out that Annie had been listening in, she became uncomfortable. This is obviously a gut reaction because intimate experiences are naturally supposed to be private experiences, too.
A third time intimacy and privacy were stripped from a situation was when Franics and Mae went to the Friday innovation talk. Francis and Mae were sitting together in the audience enjoying the talk when Francis volunteered to help the speaker and revealed that he wanted to date Mae. (Eggers 118-122). Mae was utterly embarrassed when he admitted to the whole audience that he wanted to date her, because until then, their relationship had been very intimate and private. After he told the whole room he wanted to date her, the privacy was gone and the intimacy was gone because everyone knew that there was something between them; they were no longer sharing a moment together, they were sharing the moment with everyone in the room.
Intimacy and privacy are very closely related to each other; without privacy, intimacy cannot exist. This notion was exemplified throughout the first pages of The Circle, most obviously present in moments shared between Francis and Mae. When one is tken away, the other is also lost.
I liked how you should how intimacy cannot live without privacy. It seems that the idea of privacy is what brought Mae and Francis together, but also is what has now torn them apart. I found your blog really interesting to look at this relationship.
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